Young, gifted and malevolent

movies - review

But for its flaws, 'Funny Games' is superior to a run-of-the-mill Hollywood thriller.

March 14, 2008|By Roger Moore, Sentinel Movie Critic

Funny Games is a home-invasion thriller that puts the viewer firmly in the predicament of an upper-class American family utterly ill-equipped to deal with the threat of physical violence. Maybe we don't have a lakefront country home in upstate New York, but anybody can identify with the terror and sense of helpless rage of this family that is violated, without provocation, by a couple of punks.

It's a pity the movie is so smug, gimmicky and heartless. Funny Games is a cut above standard-issue Hollywood thrillers in so many ways -- acting, set-ups, tension that grows by the minute. But this remake of a 1997 Austrian thriller about villains playing torture games with a wealthy family is entirely too Teutonic for its own good.

In a prologue designed to put us ill at ease from the start, George (Tim Roth), Anne (Naomi Watts) and their young son (Devon Gearhart) play "name that opera, name that soprano" on their drive into the country. They're in a Land Rover, towing an expensive wooden sailboat. They're living the good life.

And then the operatic arias are cut off for an ear-splitting blast of death metal as the credits roll, and the Garbers pull into their gated enclave.

All's not well on this remote lake. Their close neighbor (Boyd Gaines) is tentative in greeting them. He has company, two dapper teens wearing white shirts, tennis shorts and, inexplicably, white gloves. The vibe these overly polite Eddie Haskells give off is creepy.

Director Michael Haneke (CachM-i), remaking his own film, doles out the suspense in tiny measures, delaying the terror. A long, friendly encounter with the lads turns first odd, then awkward and then testy. Next thing you know, the Garbers are in danger of not making it through one horrific night.

Haneke's patience, allowing scenes to unfold slowly without edits, which relieve tension, serves him well. The uncertain menace of these prissy, preppy thugs (Michael Pitt, sporting a Hitler comb-over, and Brady Corbet) bursts out of the closet as they hold the family hostage to play "Cat's in the Bag" or "The Loving Wife."

Their manners say the best schools, breeding. Their behavior is straight out Compulsion, motiveless murder with homoerotic undertones.

And the Garbers are reduced to one degradation and humiliation after another, none more pathetic than their whimpers of, "Please, just let us go."

Where Haneke trips himself up is in his effort to make the movie itself a game, with Pitt's "Peter" turning to the camera and asking, "You're on their side, right?"

Yes, we are. And we don't need you to remind us.

The cruel games the preppies play mirror the games Haneke plays with the filmmaking, too-obvious moments of foreshadowing, payoffs promised and then yanked away.

Watts and Roth are riveting to watch in the film's excruciating "games." But Haneke's hand is always present -- in his casting of quasi-Aryan villains, his smirking dismissal of thriller conventions, his obvious inspirations (1960s Euro-thrillers Purple Noon and Knife in Water). He distances himself from the story as he toys with us, and that allows us to wriggle out of moments that should have a hint of heartbreak in the horror.

It's as if the old Mike Myers Saturday Night Live character Dieter were interrupting this nerve-racking moment or that one, turning to the camera and saying, "Your movie no longer amuses me."